Oklahoma originally had seven counties (Logan, Cleveland, Oklahoma, Canadian, Kingfisher, Payne, and Beaver) when it was first organized as the Oklahoma Territory. These counties were designated numerically, first through seventh. New counties added after this were designated by letters of the alphabet. The first seven counties were later renamed. The Oklahoma Constitutional Convention named all of the counties that were formed when Oklahoma entered statehood in 1907. Only two counties have been formed since then.[2] Upon statehood, all Oklahoma counties allowed civil townshipswithin their counties. A few years after statehood, a constitutional amendment allowed them to be abolished on a county by county basis, and by the mid-1930s, all Oklahoma counties had voted to do so.[3]

According to the Oklahoma Constitution, a county can be disorganized if the sum of all taxable property is less than two and a half million dollars. If so, then a petition must be signed by one-fourth of the population and then a vote would occur. If a majority vote for dissolution of the county, the county will be combined with an adjacent county with the lowest valuation of taxable property.[4]

The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) code, which is used by the United States government to uniquely identify counties, is provided with each entry. The FIPS code for each county links to census data for that county.

The Area in these tables is land area, and does not include water area.

The town of Nowata, Oklahoma. The exact origin is unknown, but the two most common stories are that railroad surveyors used the Delaware word noweta for welcome or that a sign was posted indicating that local springs had no water: No wata